ST JOHN HOTEL: THE ORIGINATOR

There's a pleasing circularity about the opening of this latest branch of St John, a hotel and restaurant in the heart of London's Chinatown, which only occurred to me as I was having a less than satisfying second starter (restaurants, eh?) there: I was eating only a short hop away from Polpetto which occupies what had once been the French House Dining Room AKA St John Mk1.

In the seventeen or so years since the mothership proper opened in Clerkenwell there have been many imitators - the "School of St John" as HS has coined it - which have developed the idea of a few primo ingredients, simply prepared and arranged just so but few have had the chutzpah of the original to leave things as they are. Like that old stalwart Manzi's, the fish restaurant (and sometimes hotel) which occupied this site five years ago, StJ has remained pretty immune to the fads and fashions of the London dining scene.

Walking into the new joint the other day gave me a little frisson of recognition. the clean, white room which always reminds me of a secure facility, where you half expect to see R.P McMurphy (waiters as orderlies); here, the terse menu; there, the small glass tumblers and the smiley, efficient service.  All present and correct.  

And The food? Well they don’t call Fergus Henderson the Mies van der Rohe of the restaurant world for nothing (actually they don’t - I just made that bit up). So there are dishes where the use of white space on the plate is as important as the food. Ok, so the portions are not the most generous around but you get the point (that the plating is part of the shtick).
 
I liked my first starter of Veal Tongue very much.  It had that effortless quality you might get in a plate of food on the continent but seldom find here. Some waxy potatoes, watercress and a mustardy dressing enlivened by capers were mixed with the slices of tongue. It was a little underseasoned for my tastes but that seems to be the modern way - I like things pushed a little in this department.

The dreaded portion control was in the house in a second starter. The pressed Pig’s Head - a variation on the brawn theme - was rather good but there was so little of it that it was more like a seasoning than the main element.  C'mon St J, is your bottom line really going to be compromised by serving up a couple more slices?  Hmmm? The flavours of the rest of the assembly may also have come through more clearly with less dressing.

A main course of Pigeon was better and almost an exemplar of the StJ philosophy. A couple of leg joints had been cooked to rare and were of excellent quality.  There’s no indication of the provenance here - you just take it for granted that the raw ingredients will be very good. The innards had been mashed up and spread on fried bread. They didn’t have a particularly gamey hit, but they weren’t awful. The bitterness of the turnips worked well with the rich bird but I could have done with less liquid sloshing around. Not very St.John.

Desserts have always been a major strength of the kitchen. One was a vibrantly coloured (and tasting) Blood Orange Jelly served with  some segments of that fruit, a blob of preternaturally rich and thick Jersey Cream and the shortest and crumbliest of shortbread biscuits.  The second an oh-so-boozy Marc ice cream, sweetened by the addition of Sultanas and accompanied by a glossy sablé biscuit.

Some decent coffee tailended the meal but at £15 a shot La Vieille Prune was a bit de trop for this diner.

Obviously, this style of food won’t be for everybody - sometimes you just need a bit more of yer actual cooking going on, especially at the prices charged - but if you're in the mood for a bit of minimalism or you want to know where it all started then the St John Hotel will pretty much do the job.  It did for me anyway.

KEELUNG: DINING WITH THE SHADOWS

Who knew that Sir Cliff and The Shadows were so big in Taiwan?

Well, if the décor of Keelung, a new Taiwanese restaurant on Lisle Street from the people who brought you Leong’s Legend, is to believed they are obviously gods. Particularly when said décor is added to the restaurants chosen soundtrack for DH’s Sunday lunch which blared tribute to the former Mr Webb’s & Co’s career from the Soho coffee shop days of “Move It” through the pomp magnificence of “Wired for Sound” and all the way up to the solo Yuletide smash that is “Mistletoe & Wine”

Mind you, if the job lot of black & white pictures which adorn the wall of Keelung are to believed the Taiwanese also dig The Rat Pack, love Louise Brookes and, most oddly of all worship at the feet of Dame Anna Neagle.

The confusion was added to as we took a booth in the darkened restaurant and were presented with a variety of menus to work our way through and an ordering form that would have made Alan Turing take pause.

Keelung offers itself up as a “Seafood Restaurant” and the first piece of paper listed all the available fruits of the sea along with the nine ways they could be cooked ranging from simple steaming to Sichuan style and even as sashimi, reflecting the influence of cooking from all over China on the island.

Added to this there is the standard menu, which offers up small plates of Taiwanese specialities under the unnecessary Esparanto of “Night Market Street Food Tapas” just in case any customer was is stupid to understand the small plate concept without reference to Spanish dining. Finally, there was one more paper sheet upon which you were asked to mark your order and which listed some but not all of the dishes from the previous two menus.

After about ten minutes our collective ninety five years of life experience had just allowed us to figure out an ordering strategy and, while making a token nod to reason the restaurant exists, DH were more attracted by the offer of pig and its innards in various forms than fish or seafood.

The dishes arrived rapidly and in no discernable order and soon the table for four was covered with the opening salvo of stir-fried Morning Glory, gua bao, a Taiwanese take on the hamburger and three light flaky puffs with a curry filling. The puffs stood out, piping hot and crumbling nicely on the tongue to reveal gently spiced contents, although I again had to wonder if the menu use of the word “samosa” has some origin in ancient trading routes or was another nod towards the expected stupidity of diners?

Braised belly pork with rice could have been a contender but if the meat had not been dry as a bone, but the pig factor was saved by the appearance of a bowl of boneless trotters also braised in soy and rice wine, which were rich and fatty falling apart as we tried to move them from bowl to plate.

Given our love of meat the fact that the star dish of the day was a plate of crisp bean curd cubes in a sharp plum sauce with a heaping helping of deep-fried garlic should tell you just how good it was, better even than a plate of four meaty prawns served Sichuan style in a tell tale slick of chilli infused oil. We had asked for the dish to be cooked “Kung Pao” style, also from Sichuan but, whether through our confusion or that of the kitchen, peanuts were noticeable by their absence although the excellent prawns themselves were soon being eaten, shell and all, with the heads sucked dry before being discarded.

A final dish of sixteen Xia Long Bao, including a special with crab meat, were a step too far away from Taiwan and not very good at all. Suitably soupy with a good broth, the dough was tough and scarcely worth the effort it took to break through and in the end the final handful were left in the steaming basket with neither of us showing any enthusiasm for completing the job.

Keelung has a large wine list and a range of that rather nasty bubble tea that was all the rage a few years ago, but we stuck to tea and with an added service charge our bill came to £52, about the same as a typical DH Sunday afternoon sortie for Dim Sum and enough to convince that it may just be worth another visit to spend more time exploring the list of seafood and Taiwanese specialities.

As long as they promise to buy another CD. Sorry Cliff.

RASA SAYANG: NOT QUITE FEELING THE LOVE IN CHINATOWN

It’s probably an age thing, but my recollection of London’s ethnic food offerings in the late 80’s and early 90’s is of them being less in number but, well, simply better than we have now.

As I said, I may be viewing them through the tumeric glow of a middle-aged man's eyes, but my memories are of Thai places making green curries with the pre-requisite types of aubergine, of Indian restaurants that escaped the clutches of brown slop curry houses without having to run to the arms of faux French dining styles and Malaysian restaurants that truly represented the bewildering variety of one of the world’s great eating nations. Now, we seem to have many more restaurants offering food from an even wider variety of regions, but the flavours strike me as muted, apologetic, neutered so as not to offend and with commercial pastes taking the place of time consuming fresh sauces.

I would certainly be interested to hear if anyone else feels the same.

Rasay Sayang means, I am told, to “feel the love” and I certainly loved my first experiences of the small chain bearing that name, who offered my first tastes of Malaysian and Singaporean food nearly twenty years ago. They are long gone now, the main branch, in Soho, has become a Nando’s which tells you all you need to know about the way we eat in the UK.

However, as Malaysia was one of the favourite stops of my EAT MY GLOBE trip, I was intrigued when I heard that a small restaurant of the same name had opened in Chinatown directly next to the disappointing Leong’s Legend and, I arranged a quick supper there with one of my oldest friends, Neal.

First, however, a quick dip into the fabulous new bar at Rules, where Brian Silva, one of the great mixers in town prepared me a “proper” Rob Roy using orange bitters from The Bitters Truth and Italian vermouth. Perfect to fortify against the sudden and unexpected snowfall, which was enough to keep sufficient diners away so we could walk in and get a table in the small dining room right away.

It’s a short menu with a mix of, as far as my limited knowledge could tell, traditional Malay dishes and some representing their considerable Chinese influence.

Starters were a mixed bag. The satay were slightly chewy, not comparing well to those on offer at Puji Puji, but the curry puffs were much better, with a filling of beef and potatoes and a light, grease free batter coating. The ones I had tried before had a short crust pastry, but, my love of all things deep-fried, made these an interesting alternative.

Nasi Lemak was one of the favourite dishes of my short time in Kuala Lumpur and the version on offer at Rasa Sayang is not bad at all. The rice, as it should be was gently flavoured with coconut and pandan, the accompaniments to the chicken curry all seemed to be present and correct including a small mound of salty dried anchovies and the curry itself was in a deep, savoury sauce.

Another high point scorer was a plate of crunchy morning glory stir fried with balachan, the potent shrimp paste mixed with chilli, which was good enough to have us both fighting over the last strands while other plates sat by.

Other dishes failed to live up to these high standards. The beef rendang lacked punch and simply made me long for the recipe I tried recently at home, which combined freshness, meatiness and fire to stunning effect. Likewise, the char kway teow, which, I suspect, was fried in oil rather than in pork fat as the best versions I have tried have been. With a generous amount of seafood on show, it looked the part, but as is so often the case, it simply lacked any discernable flavour soon ending up as cold, flat noodles.

The bill for the meal with service and a beer came to £44 for two, enough to make this an acceptable if uninspiring supper where the chance to catch up took precedence over the food. Sometimes, perhaps that is all you need, but I could not help thinking that, if we had eaten this meal twenty years ago, we might have done a whole lot less talking and been a whole lot more excited about eating.

Or, is that just me?

LEONG'S LEGEND: A MYTH NOT A HIT

There is an ancient Chinese legend, which tells of two weary travellers who, after a long journey, find themselves in the heart of a big city. Famished from their journey, they approach a cheery tavern where they are quickly seated in the warmth and presented with hearty dishes to assuage their hunger as the friendly inn owner and his wife bustle about making sure that they and all the other guests receive perfect hospitality.

Their food is spectacular. A soup made with noodles and beef tendon warms them to the soul, small dumplings threaten to burst so filled are they with savoury broth and little nuggets of chicken crackle with the sound of recent frying.

It is everything they could have dreamed of. It is the stuff of legend and, sipping on restorative tea they close their eyes to savour the moment.

Er, and then they wake up and find that they are in fact two impoverished food writers seated in a draughty corner of yet another restaurant in Chinatown, which promises to deliver something different but fails. The service is perfunctory and the food, cheap though it is, still doesn’t feel like the real thing.

Leong’s Legend (you knew there had to be a point to the beginning of our tale, didn’t you?) is one of those places that crop up in Chinatown every now and again and get peoples' undergarments all in a knot.

“Squeal, it’s the real thing. Squeal” You know the drill.

They are of course no such thing and although, like Bar Shu, they have some aspects the purists can cling onto, the economic factors of their location and therefore their clientele ensure that they are never going to take too many risks or be too (dreaded “A” word alert) authentic.

LL has been around a while now and had people raving about its interpretation of Taiwanese food and its soup filled dumplings but, even on a brief and cheap lunchtime excursion and even to our palates, untutored to this island’s cooking, the dishes all seemed listless, neutered and lacking in taste.

While the beef tendon in a “spicy” soup was pleasingly fatty and soft, the noodles were pre-cooked to mush and the broth lacked any discernable flavour at all. Likewise fried chicken, where the small pieces of bird had toughened up to little rocks as if they had just been refried from the previous night's service.

The much vaunted siu long bao, dumplings filled with soup, are originally from Shanghai but taken to excellence by many Taiwanese places, as I found at Din Tai Fun in L.A. The elastic pastry of the best examples bulges ominously as you pick them up but never bursts giving you the pleasure of biting a hole and slurping out the contents. Here, the juice was already leaking over the steamer and the wet dumplings had already attached themselves to the base, which meant that any residual liquid was lost as we struggled to pick them up. The meaty contents were well seasoned and a final dish of braised belly pork with rice, was perfectly fine , but like the rest of meal, all far too polite to cause a raised eyebrow.

Our bill of £24 including service charge was low enough not to depress us too much but did add to our conviction that all this talk of a new beginning in Chinatown is, like the beginning of this post, a bit of a myth.

HARBOUR CITY: DIRE DIM SUM ON A DAY OFF.

There is a fairy tale about the three little pigs and the big bad wolf. The denouement, if my memory serves me well, has the sleeping wolf having his stomach opened to free the piggies within and having them replaced with rocks. He awakes, staggers to the nearest river for a drink, falls in and drowns.

After today’s lunch at Harbour City, I know just how he feels. I am pretty sure I ate pig, but I came out of there feeling like I had eaten rocks.

I have always rather liked Harbour City. As the more basic dim sum houses go, it has always offered up very decent dumplings and fried food that seemed to be a notch above others on the same street.

So today, when HP suggested lunch in The West End, Harbour City seemed like as good a choice as any. What a shame as it turned out all to be pretty poor ranging from "blah" to "yuk".

We always order a pretty large amount of dumplings and fried food and supplement this with plates of roast pork and duck. No change today.

A range of steamed dumplings ( Har Kau, Siu Mai, Char Sui Buns, Scallop & Chive Dumplings ) were lumpen and dense. The grilled Cheung Fun with dried shrimp was all cheung and no fun. Quite nasty in fact.

A series of fried dim sum ( Taro paste, Yam Croquettes, Paper Wrapped Prawns ) were greasy and heavy.

Baked treasury pork puffs, normally light and spicy, were doughy and cold.

Even the roast meats ,usually excellent, were very poor indeed. The duck was oily and cloying and the belly pork dry as a bone if ,at least, having a decent crackling skin.

The only two dishes worthy of note were both on the specials list. A fried squid paste and a plate of Duck's kidney's. The latter were not cheap ( at £5.50 a plate ) but at least offered a different taste to the one note cooking of the rest

We struggled through a lot of it because we were starving, but left a great deal. Unheard of for us.

And, with the portions of meat, it was not cheap. £55 for two. What you would pay for two at Royal China

The problem with eating dim sum at this most basic level in London is that there is no level of consistency. For every two decent meals you have in one place you will have one bad.

I staggered out of there feeling stuffed but not in a good way. I actually felt a little queasy as the oily lumpen mass began to slosh around my insides. Quite disconcerting.

In the end, it is probably worth paying the extra and going to the places at the mid and high end where, although, you are paying more per head, the cooking is consistent and the offerings a little more innovative

As for Harbour City. I don't think I will be rushing back anytime soon